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Magical Chinese Hard Drive
jamax writes "From TFA: 'A Russian friend .... works at a hard-drive repair center in a Russian town, located near the Chinese border. A couple of days ago a customer brought a broken 500GB USB-drive that he had bought in a Chinese store across the river, for an insanely low price. But the drive was not working: if you, say, save a movie onto the drive, playing the saved movie back resulted in replaying just the last 5 minutes of the film.' Apparently, the contents of the external HDD box included: two nuts, glued to the inner surface of the box with a 128MB flash drive wedged between them (image). And it was a clever hack, too — if ever an attempt was made to write a file that's too large, it got cycled — rewriting itself over and over from the beginning, while leaving the existing files intact. And it reported everything correctly — file sizes and all!"
"Ancient Chinese Secret"
I've sent about a terabyte of critically important data to a special compression device my computer came with, called "/dev/null", and it still hasn't filled up.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This actually made me LOL. I guess there's a sucker born every minute. Pretty clever hack!
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
That is fucking magical. I dont support this rip off, but DAMN that was a cool idea and well pulled off. This was not some back town hick, but a well thought out plan, using parts brought/found locally.
Bravo engineer/shop keep who made it!!!
wow, something alongside a couple of nuts that's smaller than it's supposed to be.
I have a friend that ordered a dirt cheap 4 gig MP3 player from some outfit in Hong Kong. He got it, and plugged it in, and it dutifully reported it had 4 gig of free space. As he started loading it up, it kept locking everything up after about 2 gig. Turns out, it only had 2 gig of memory, but was doctored to report it had 4 when queried.
This is reason 1 why your average corporation has a mini-corporation inside it that does nothing but accept packages and perform testing on their contents to be sure that requirements are being met. Doesn't matter if it's a blade server or a box of pencils. Sleaze is an industry. So is acceptance testing. But if you do it right it doesn't just prevent fraud, it increases your reliability a ton, as it keeps you from stuffing parts that are merely statistical DOA.
(Reason 2 is that without that layer, there's no tracking of who got what, and embezzlement is an industry too.)
To be fair, it's an integral part of business culture in the rest of the world, too. The Chinese just aren't as subtle about it.
Some proper trolling could be had with a device like that. I want one!
It's called WOM, Write Only Memory, in this case with a small cache to improve performance. (:-)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Your friend must be new to that computer news site then.
These devices aren't even made specifically for this hack. These are common data recorders for weather stations, EDR's for autos, etc. The genius here was probably more in the acquisition of the case and label.
I bought a 2GB micro SD off ebay for cheap, received it and it reported the size correctly, except when it got past 32MB (yes megabytes) i got IO errors. Turns out, the FAT table was written as 2GB on a 32MB card. Writing zeroes then reformatting revealed only 32MB partition onward.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
is an integral part of Chinese business culture and it's not funny.
Sorry, but this is definitely funny. Especially since I'm not affected by it. A lot of things the Chinese do to make money are pretty funny, in fact. It's not like it's a tragedy, if they thought it was tragic they would try to change it. In fact, one of the funniest things about the whole thing is that it is so integral, even the government rips things off. The best part is they act like nothing is going on. That's not Mickey Mouse, it's a cat with round ears! That's not Donald Duck, it's an original Chinese duck character! This is like a bad B-movie plot, but it's actually happening.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You've heard of WORM (write once read many), now we have WARN (write
always, read never).
Are those the customer's nuts inside?
Not terribly funny. A little clever. Simple fraud is the most accurate.
Think of it in these terms - the "firmware" of these devices is like a financial statement created by Bernie Madoff. The "storage area" is the actual wealth reported on the paperwork.
Why is "fake storage" fraud any funnier than financial fraud. Hey, how about a "funny" story about some discount pharmaceuticals?
It's funny because it's happening in China and China is about as capitalist as a country can get, despite the title, it is expected. Further, the ingenuity of people in China to fake things like this is quite impressive. Bernie Madoff only intended to do his scam on a small scale, problem was, Wall Street was so impressed and sent so many rich suckers his way he couldn't say 'No!' and it grew beyond his wildest dreams (why he never planned an escape hatch is beyond me, but who says criminals are smart or forward thinking?) Without greed there would be so little crime.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Mmm. Some years ago my family and I were eating in our favorite local Chinese restaurant. It was a nice place (gone now), and we were friends with the manager. That particular evening as drinks were being selected the manager told us that a friend of his had just sold him a bunch of very good imported Chinese beer called Yuengling. My father and I immediately recognized the name as that of this beer, our favorite brew from "America's Oldest Brewery" (despite the name, it's actually of German origin). He brought out a bottle and sure enough, it was the Black & Tan we knew so well, with the label altered. The manager was quite embarrassed and said he would have to talk to this "friend" of his. Actually at this time we weren't aware that the brewery had expanded, you used to only be able to get it right from the brewery in Pennsylvania.
I got my hands on a 64GB "Sony" flash drive given to me by a student who bought it on e-bay and kept losing data on it. Since the largest drive I had ever seen was 16GB at the time, I was curious how a 64GB just popped out of the woodwork. Turns out, the maximum capacity was 128MB, however, the file system reported 64GB on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
When writing data to the drive, Windows would allow the drive to loop and continually overwrite itself while the Mac OS and Linux boxes would hit the 128MB limit and start throwing I/O errors.
This was about 2 years ago...good to see they're still at it and have expanded into the SSD arena. /sarcasm
Wow - finding 128 MB Flash drives is pretty tough these days! He must have gotten some really cheap leftovers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Agreed. I just went down a list of the products I've bought in the past year, and if you ignore DVDs and books, the percentage that have worked correctly for more than a week is somewhere around zero.
USB flash drive watch (ThinkGeek): broke after four days. When the replacement arrived, the flash drive was halfway pulled apart, the glue that held it together having apparently failed. This tells me that it probably failed QA testing (somebody had to have tried to open it or else it would not have been hanging halfway out), but got shipped to me in spite of that. Yikes.
USB keychain drive from Kingston: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four or five months. Replacement drive with substantially inferior case: the part that held it on my keychain broke after four days.
USB keychain drive from Lacie (XtremKey): the wire part that held it onto my keychain broke after less than a week, and has subsequently been replaced by a hand-crimped steel cord from Home Depot. Details in my Amazon review.
Konica Minolta color laser printer: needs a technician to recalibrate it right out of the box because the fuser isn't fusing properly on card stock.
Eyeglasses arrived from the manufacturer with a scratch across the middle of one lens.
Bought complete series DVD collections for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Went through seven SG-1 sets in a row. Ended up taking advantage of Amazon shipping out replacements before you return the product so that I could combine four different sets just to get one single set without any unreadable discs. The discs in the factory-sealed package looked like they had been placed in gravel and spun rapidly. Pics or it didn't happen. Then, I had the same problem with the Stargate Atlantis series collection, but I only had to combine two or three sets to get one working set.
And the list goes on. So yeah, I hear you. The only difference between the Chinese knock offs and the worst American products are that the worst American products at least ostensibly work for a couple of days before they don't. Usually. And this is what happens when consumers don't care about product quality.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Ambitious? It depends. If you're a manufacturing firm that makes flash drives, it might be very easy to make this modification. When you're set up to be able to give a low-ball quote to manufacture something quickly, you're also pretty well set up to make a cheap counterfeit of the same thing, whether or not you actually get the contract.
A few years back there were reports of counterfeit Li-ion cells and batteries when the production was shifted to China from Japan. Even where batteries continue to be made in Japan, there are pretty convincing Chinese made knock-offs. One of the tell-tale signs are Kanji characters (traditional Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) that are replaced with their simplified counterparts used in China today. Clearly these are made by companies in the business of making these kinds of batteries and cells, but the counterfeits may lack many of the redundant safety features that allow you to carry your phone or camera in your pocket without risk.
It would be quite easy for a flash drive manufacturer to make a drive with 128MB that reports as 500G. The looping business may have something to do with how they performed that particular trick (e.g. mapping the same sector multiple times). Then all you need is a friend in the company that produces the Samsung disk enclosures, and you've got a pretty sweet scam. Remember, this is the country that fed its own infants with melamine laced formula. A country with no effective business regulation and a government allergic to bad news is a paradise for a slick operator.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Back in the 80s, one of my cow-orkers bought a VCR "off the back of a truck" in New York. It was really a VCR case with a brick in it.
These days when I've had bricked electronics, it just means that the firmware has gotten too hosed to boot, but this was genuine brick.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hey everybody on the internet, stop trying to make every wrong equal to every other wrong. Massive counterfeiting operations run by the Chinese government are totally not the same as standard political games you see everywhere. It may not be worse, it may not be better, but the point is they're unrelated. So stop being a turd.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
The Bastard Operator From Hell is going to be pissed that he didn't think of this.
...an hour later, you're always hungry again!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
One of the comments on the article says he has seen a similar controller chip before, used in a vehicle black-box. It writes data to flash, looping over when it reaches the end - that way it'll never run out of space, and in the event of a crash severe enough to cut the power the flash will contain the logs of the time immediatly prior. I suppose it's plausible that such a chip exists that would also present the data as apparently a simple file on a FAT filesystem, in order to make it easier for the programmers getting data on or off. Then all it needs is for some dodgy trader to get his hand on a crate of those cheap and realise that cheap blackbox chip plus cheap USB memory stick equals fake but expensive SSD.
Terrific, a one-demon bag. Sensational. What's in it?
The only thing funny about China is if I tried to pull one tenth of the stunts they do, over here in Canada/US, I'd spend the rest of my days in court and/or jail for fraud.
If it were just about copyright, I'd turn a blind eye, because I'm all for copyright reform, but this mentality extends far beyond the conscious disobedience of extortionary legislation. At least US corps put SOME effort into being sneaky, whereas the standard Chinese go-to is to do it all over someone's face and then state "I don't know". Struggling grocery store burns to the ground, owner says "I don't know" as he cashes the insurance cheque. Noodle house has a sudden and absurdly dramatic roach infestation, rival next door says "I don't know". Computer is brought to a shop with a virus, comes back with two more and a downgraded video card, techie says "I don't know".
I shit you not, I've been working with asian business owners for well over a decade, and with all these stories they tell me, I can't help but distrust them because after each anecdote they say "I would do the same thing if I saw an opportunity". Sometimes I think my size and lack of morals is the only reason they haven't try to pull that bullshit on me... yet.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Really? The People's Republic of China, communist in name and fascist in practice, is "about as capitalist as a country can get"?
Yup, absolutely. You're pretty well uninformed about either China or capitalism if you don't recognize this. The fact that their government is communist in name and fascist in practice does nothing to counter the fact that it is one of the most fundamentally capitalist nations in the world. I suspect you might be confusing "nation" with "government" if this seems at all contradictory to you.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
compulsive liars, cheats and thieves who will do absolutely anything to win. And it's ingrained behaviour that will never change. Even 200 years ago, British traders knew very well that the Chinese simply couldn't be trusted.
Which is why when the West declines and the Chinese rule the world, we're all fucked.
Never mind the lost files... what about the Chinese heavy machinery being made with two less nuts than spec..
CR is terrible at their job. Collecting surveys and touting the conventional brand name wisdom is not research.
My problem is that you CAN'T buy quality any more. The $100 DVD player is no better than the $15 one. The $100 cellphone is no better than the free one. A $50,000 automobile is no more reliable than a $10,000 one. Hell, even some of the professional gear is just shit with a better warranty.
It sounds like this device was acting as a big cache for a much larger non-existent space.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Anything" doesn't seem to be an exaggeration: how low do you have to be to produce fake rice from plastic and fake chicken eggs from chemicals?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Given that the quality control problems with those DVDs have been ongoing for several years, and given that the first three DVD sets (locally at Fry's) hadn't been sitting on their shelf for two or three years, I think it's safe to say that MGM must know about the quality control problems and simply chooses to ignore them. My guess is that they're counting on people buying these sets and not having time to watch all 55 DVDs before the return window closes.
So the way I figure it, I'm sticking it to the man by using a laptop to verify all the discs quickly and then returning sets until I actually get a good one. By returning 6 sets, I figure MGM lost money on my purchase even by the most conservative estimates. If enough people did that, maybe MGM would think twice before using a fly-by-night DVD fabrication plant in the future.
So yeah, it was inconvenient, but I figure it's the least I can do to improve things. And it looks like it worked. After I sent them a very detailed analysis of the issue, Amazon pulled the product entirely.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Transferring MS Word documents is not, and has never been, cool.
Blank until
Reason I do the work is most companies doing HVAC/R refuse to do work for them
They like to argue on the pricing, complain and then want to stiff you.
I ttook a hard line and have my guy on the roof or on top of the walk-in when I present them the bill.
They want to argue complain or stiff me, I yell, not say, to my guy to take my #*$&#* whatever off we are going and they will just be hot/cold/have spoiled food.
Doesn't take but once and I have no further problems from them.
I usually get my calls from folks in NYC or Chicago, wanting me to go to Golden Wok #4 or Great Wall #2.